The Fellowship of Lifea Christian-based vegetarian group founded in 1973

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Letters

Merry Christmas

Sir, - The so-called festive season is again approaching, and again
are all the horrors of revelry and gluttony painfully apparent. Shows of
obese animals are going on; the platforms are blocked with living and
dead turkeys, geese, and fowl. Drunken slaughtermen are meeting crates
of bleating calves, and, with horrid leers, conveying them to their
doom; station barrows are filled with freshly-shot deer and pheasants;
pigs are screaming everywhere. The whole country is running in blood;
and this not to feed the hungry, but, for the most part, to fill to
repletion those who at all times eat not wisely, but too well. A chemist
I know of in the North of England regularly lays in a huge store of
pills before Christmas, and all are gone by the New Year. Medical men
have assured me that the gluttony which marks this season is a rich time
of harvest to them. Can anything be more disgusting? Whatever we may
call ourselves, surely the unrestrained guzzling that goes on at "Merry
Christmas" is neither to our credit nor benefit. - I am, etc.,

Colonel William Lisle B. Coulson

Originally published during December 1903 in the Newcastle
Daily Journal.

Repinted a year later by The Humanitarian League in the December
edition of their journal The Humanitarian.